How to Change the Home Site in SharePoint Online

There are several scenarios that necessitate the change of the home Site in SharePoint Online. To properly change your SharePoint Online Home Site, we've created a tutorial below to walk you through the process so you can change the site properly. To start, the SharePoint Home Site is the landing page in which all users come first when they enter your organization’s SharePoint environment or intranet. It should have links to all important portals, resources, document libraries, conversations, news, and events in your organization. This makes it very important to plan and design your home site precisely. Before getting into how to change home site in SharePoint Online, let's first learn about how to prepare for the home site change.

How to Prepare Effectively for Changing the Home Site

Here are a few key things to consider prior to changing your home site.

• Users can change the home site either from the SharePoint Admin Center or from PowerShell.
• Users are limited to one site choice from their organization as their SharePoint Online home site.
• The home site can be registered as a hub site, however it cannot be associated with any hub.
• For changes to be applied, it can take anywhere from a couple of minutes to a maximum of two hours.
• Most importantly, you must ensure that the home site is configured as the root site of your SharePoint environment.

Below, we will demonstrate how to reconfigure your root site. 

How to Replace the Root Site

Some notes before we begin: When you configured Microsoft 365 for the first time, the root site for SharePoint is automatically set to a Communication site. The default URL will start with [your organization name].sharepoint.com. All global admins in your organization are owners of the site.

Complete the following steps to change the root site:

• Go to the Microsoft 365 Admin center by clicking Admin from the app launcher on the left side of the page
  
• From the Microsoft 365 Admin center, choose SharePoint from the Admin centers section in the left bar
  
• From the SharePoint Admin center, click the Active sites option under the Sites section on the left
  
• Sort the URL column in alphabetical order
  
• The current root site will appear first in that list
• Select the root site and click on the more options ellipses at the top
  
• Choose Replace site, and enter the new root site URL in the URL of the site you want to use
• Click Save
  

Now that you have set the new site as the root site, you can now change the home site. Let’s learn how to change the home site in SharePoint Online.

How to Change the Home Site in SharePoint

• Go to the SharePoint Admin center and follow the steps above
• Click on Settings
  
• From the page that opens, click the site that is assigned as the Home site
  
• Paste the URL of the new site in the field URL of the site you want to use
• Click Save
  

Note: it may take approximately 10 minutes for these changes to apply.

How To Ensure an Effective Home Site Change

To ensure your success in changing your home site, it's imperative that you strategize and plan ahead for a seamless, precise site change. We have webinar below that covers the basics of SharePoint Communication Sites to provide you with more context on what to expect from these sites and how they can be employed as home sites.

Below is a tutorial video to support you in changing your home site in SharePoint.